Who hasn’t heard the proverb “keep your friends close, and your enemies closer”? This phrase alludes well to a key aspect of good SEO strategies: knowing who your search competitors are. Even if you know who your traditional business competitors are, you need to bear in mind that if they are not competing for the same keywords as your sites, then they are not a “search” competitor. So, how can you easily find your real online competitors? There are many ways to do this manually (using search engines), as well as free and paid tools to help automate this process. Here are six quick and easy tools to help you with your competitive research.
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I’ve long thought that there was an opportunity to improve the way we think about internal links, and to make much more effective recommendations. I feel like, as an industry, we have done a decent job of making the case that internal links are important and that the information architecture of big sites, in particular, makes a massive difference to their performance in search.
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Being new to SEO is tricky. As a niche market within a niche market there many tools and resources unfamiliar to most new professionals. And with so much to learn it is nearly impossible to start real client work without first dedicating six months exclusively to industry training. Well...that’s how it may seem at first. As a fairly new Analyst at Distilled, I know from experience how difficult it can be to get started. So here’s a list of common SEO analyses and supporting tools that may help you get off on the right foot.
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Cloudflare recently announced that they’re launching a new feature, called “Cloudflare Workers”. It provides the ability for anybody who’s using Cloudflare as a CDN to write arbitrary JavaScript (based on the standard Service Worker API), which runs on Cloudflare’s edge nodes. The announcement is significant because, unlike tag management platforms, the alterations are made server-side, before the page is sent to the user - Google only sees the final, altered code and content. There’s no messy JavaScript in the browser, no cloaking, and no conflicting logic.

The publishing industry has been claiming victory recently in a long-running disagreement with Google over how subscription content (i.e. content that sits behind a paywall or registration wall) should appear in their search results. However, there’s a lot of confusion around the new policy which Google has announced, and a lack of clarity in how the media, publishers, and Google itself is reporting and discussing the topic.
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Technical audits are one of the activities that define SEO—we’ve all done them. But audits are only as valuable as their impact. Whether you’re a practitioner or an agency partner, your job really begins when the audit is finished. With that in mind, we asked “Can we design an audit that helps make real change happen?” The result is an aware technical audit checklist. It considers the underlying problems we’re tackling (or trying to prevent). It makes technical audits faster, more effective, and more impactful.
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Keyword Research is a fundamental principle of SEO. As marketers, we know by now that it can help drive traffic to our sites and improve organic search rankings. With the vast amount of tools available, it can be hard to find the right one. While doing keyword research for a client, Distilled Analyst Lydia Gilbertson introduced me to arguably the best tool out there - Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer.
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In the two-and-a-bit years that I’ve been working in digital marketing, I’ve been keen to understand the reasons why we make the decisions we do in digital marketing. There’s a wide variety of ways to approach a problem, and although many of them have value, there has to be a best way to make sure that the decision you make is the right one. I wanted to take my evidence-first way of thinking and apply it to this field.
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Apparently seven years ago Jeff Bezos, inspired by a love of Star Trek, decided that Amazon should build a something that you can talk to, and which would turn your commands into actions. Now Amazon Alexa is competing with a growing number of intelligent personal assistants from almost every corporate behemoth around. In order for any one of these companies to win this race, they need individuals and companies to develop a lot of the programs, or at least the program-specific integrations, for them.
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I’ve found it tough to get my head around all the arguments in the recent EU judgement against Google. I find that writing helps me get my thoughts together and work out what I really think, so here goes. Let’s find out whether I agree with the ruling or not…
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With our new ODN platform, we were excited to test the impact of JavaScript on search performance. Google has been talking about rendering JavaScript and indexing the resulting DOM for some time, and others around the industry have been testing various aspects of it, figuring out when it times out, and finding out the differences between inline, external, and bundled JS. When we ran an SEO split test to remove a reliance on JavaScript, we saw an uplift in search performance.
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We’ve all heard the horror stories about sites that have migrated from one domain to another and experienced a huge drop in traffic and visibility, and those that have suffered the same fate just by changing protocol. Whether you have acquired a domain, want to roll up your M-Dot site into a responsive design or desire a move from http to https, devising a solid action plan to avoid traffic and revenue loss is paramount.
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